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inspirations

What’s the Difference Between a Crowdsourcing Volunteer and a Medieval Scribe?

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I’ve been studying ways we might reduce errors--including my own!--in crowdsourced transcription projects. Part of that work has been analyzing a dataset of raw volunteer contributions to the Missouri State Archives death certificate indexing project, but another part has been reading what textual scholars have written about errors left by ancient and medieval … [Read more...] about What’s the Difference Between a Crowdsourcing Volunteer and a Medieval Scribe?

An Interview with Molly Kerr of History Revealed

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Molly Kerr, the Founding Director of History Revealed, Inc., a non-profit, historical research organization, kindly spoke with Sara Brumfield about their experience using FromThePage. First, tell us about your documents. The Shopping Stories project focuses on store ledgers from the 18th century. Our first phase transcribed the John Glassford & Company store ledgers … [Read more...] about An Interview with Molly Kerr of History Revealed

Crowdsourcing: Free Labor or Free Puppy?

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Sitting next to a senior leader of a European library at a IIIF event, he expressed concern that asking volunteers to work on transcribing was taking unfair advantage of free labor.  My internal reaction was, “you just want to keep all the good stuff for yourself!” -- but of course I didn’t say that.  I talked about meaningful volunteer work and how -- since our very first … [Read more...] about Crowdsourcing: Free Labor or Free Puppy?

An Archivist's Tale Podcast - The Power of These Primary Sources to Bring Meaning

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Back in 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic, Ben and Sara Brumfield sat with Karen Trivette and Geof Huth, husband and wife, and partners who run the podcast An Archivist's Tale. In this podcast, Ben and Sara discuss the origin story of FromThePage, their own backgrounds leading up to working in transcription software, motivations for the work they do, notable FromThePage … [Read more...] about An Archivist's Tale Podcast - The Power of These Primary Sources to Bring Meaning